


Concomitant

by peccadilloes



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Lie Low At Lupin's, M/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-19 21:42:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10648620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peccadilloes/pseuds/peccadilloes
Summary: Remus comes home and into the kitchen that evening with a soft blue book, and he sets it on the table.“Some hipster hippie witch in Venice gave it to me,” he says. “Makes them.”Sirius picks up the book and in his hands it changes, grows large and slim and harder bound. He rubs his thumb over its waxed thread, and its cover pools with longing.a lie low in Los Angeles, oneiromancy





	Concomitant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [montparnasse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/gifts).



> orig [posted on LJ](http://rs-small-gifts.livejournal.com/228344.html) for small gifts 2016 & then you know, lj ToS blah blah blah
> 
> ty eve for the imagination-sparking prompts & giving me a reason + a way to write about la (and for inspiring a new whole escapade at this point), firecatcher for everything as always, & zambla for beta + thoughts. <33 related jams are at the bottom.

Remus comes home and into the kitchen that evening with a soft blue book, and he sets it on the table.  
  
“Some hipster hippie witch in Venice gave it to me,” he says. “Makes them.”  
  
Sirius picks up the book and in his hands it changes, grows large and slim and harder bound. He rubs his thumb over its waxed thread, and its cover pools with longing. The book falls itself open between his palms, its scent almost sweet. _Remember honey_? An image of Remus moving breaths in sleep half under a blanket, half back exposed. Hand-sketched and sepia and cream. _Delicate_. Scar lines and bones and freckles and birthmarks. _Delicate, delicate_. A curl of hair at the back of Remus’s neck.  
  
“She paid cash, so... tacos?”  
  
Sirius startles, claps the book.  
  
All that slow breathing and narrow extending moment gone into a drop in his throat, a receding in his stomach, the rapiding up beat of blood in his chest through his own heart, and the blinking look around with his eyes.  
  
“Alive,” Sirius says. His lips pull dry across and his tongue sticks tip against palate, so he swallows.  
  
The book settles itself on the tabletop between the pistachios in their plastic sack and the oranges gleaned into their basket. Sirius watches the book’s cover still into gradients of warm, then oceanic, and then coastal hues.  
  
“Put some clothes on,” Remus is saying from the front room. Sirius hears the fwap of Remus’s cane smacking to the floor. He mouths along: “Shit. Fuck. Wingardium Leviosa.”  
  
  
  
The book shimmers in sunlight on Sirius’s lap. It sighs open to a wide, eroding desert and a straight-cutting empty two-lane road. Remus’s Prius drops onto the spread and nudges along toward the upper right-hand corner.  
  
An ember glow catches in Sirius’s peripheral vision. A flame, a fire. Dumbledore bursting his rude head through the Floo.  
  
Sirius flaps his hand around from his perch in Remus’s bathrobe on the couch, shooing. “What? You’re gonna try and scold the living shit out of _me_ now? Remus--”  
  
“Stop leaving the house.”  
  
  
  
The Prius crunches into the gravel lot, and Remus parks close to the mural brushed pink and gray with two lively, snarling wolves. Sirius in the car drops to Padfoot, snarls a bit back. Routine: the potions dispensary near but not by the elevated Chinatown station. Then,  
  
People are everywhere in front of the Super King. Sirius clings to the cart while Remus handles yams, potatoes.  
  
“Didn’t you want a pineapple?” Remus says. “Sirius--go pick one out.”  
  
So between his palms, the heft and prickling weight of a pineapple. Then another. Greens, browns, yellows. A sort of alcohol fragrance. Tufts of mold on some bottoms. Their little hats.  
  
“How do you know?” He says.  
  
Remus, elsewhere, fussing open a plastic bag. “Huh?”  
  
“How do you tell if it’s ripe?”  
  
  
  
They settle elbow-to-elbow in big lean-back chairs on the porch. They prop their feet on a low table, startle away the cat. The smoggy pink-orange flush fades beyond the skyline, and Remus wands the fairy lights to twinkling.  
  
He gives Sirius a look then busies himself lighting the joint he’d rolled inside.  
  
Fingertips bump in the pass.  
  
Sirius takes a few solid hits and allows himself another two in quick succession, one on top the other. Back to Remus. The sky softens further into night.  
  
“I think I kind of always dated James, in a way.”  
  
“Duh,” Remus says. The joint between his fingers becomes an object worth examining. “It had been right there in front of your face the whole time.”  
  
“Your face too though,” Sirius says.  
  
“Nah,” Remus says. “Not really. Learned from my mistakes.”  
  
The coyotes up the hill take to laughing.  
  
“Moony.” Sirius, reaching. “Moony, give it here.”  
  
  
  
The book shrinks to paperback when Remus lifts it off the couch. He holds it, gentle, as it covers itself in a listless blue sunk with the desperate, uncertain marks Sirius’s hands began to wear in prison. Then Remus, in some sweet and perfect act of generosity, opens the book.  
  
Sirius peers over a held inhale and sees  
  
Remus standing beside a block of construction in a dream-built variant New York. Remus looking up then weaving among pedestrian barriers that twist him onto a street and leaned planks toward a sidewalk slushed with puddles.  
  
Remus taking rushed steps down, a yellow card swiping the look of a beep and turnstile. Remus bunched into a rush hour subway car, his gaze cast inward and his knees close around his cane.  
  
Sirius watches every Remus ride subway cars across the pages: Remus in the blue sweater and then Remus in the green one. Remus at the new moon, Remus under the lifting weight of the waning gibbous.  
  
“Your dreams look like cartoons,” Sirius says. Their bodies are so close. They are touching.  
  
Remus fans the pages backward, his thumb pinching shut the book’s latter interpretations. He protects them with his forefinger when he moves to hold open the landing spread: pineapples piled everywhere.  
  
A little tufted pale gray owl bonks the window, and Sirius gets up to let her inside. Remus catches the bird in his hands and passes its note to Sirius to read.  
  
“All the cool kids are paying out the ass for my dream books,” Sirius says, “and then they hex me when they don’t like what they see.”  
  
  
  
They’re two CDs deep into the stuttering traffic grind when Remus glances over his right shoulder and slides them from the HOV lane to ramp off.  
  
“I want--” Sirius says.  
  
Remus touches the volume knob. “Do you?”  
  
  
  
Sirius follows Remus through a disillusionment-soaked back door into a shaded kitchen. A witch with a gap between her front teeth and a certain vibe of fluid magic settles Sirius on a stool by the counter and pours him a green juice from the fridge. When she catches him looking at the stick-and-pokes on her knuckles and the backs of her hands, she makes a fist and waits til he bumps it.  
  
Then shifts her attention to Remus, who needles her with his elbow.  
  
“Don’t even start, Lupin.”  
  
“Book witch,” Remus teases. “ _Dream_ witch.”  
  
“Dream _bitch_ more like,” she says, grins. “So you gonna get rid of all my hate mail for me? Got like six million boggarts and some fucking bats and shit.”  
  
Her hand presses sure in the small of Remus’s back, and she guides him away up a stair flight.  
  
Sirius stays sitting in the scheme of things and in his soft clothes, in his hand-backs and arms and chest and everywhere inked so sloppily even in comparison to--  
  
The building pushes him out its front and down weird crowded blocks to cross in front of two giggling Muggles on a surrey bike and abrupt onto the beach where the bluing curve of the earth narrows into an un-claw-outable wooze.  
  
So he just. He squats down and tucks his head between his knees and searches, waits until he can remember. Can find one word, then a number, then a word again, and maybe one two three until he has hands and feet and a body and he can look up, unfold.  
  
  
  
Remus dips the car into Koreatown and waits out a parking spot at a two-tier strip mall Sirius would be hard pressed to discern from any other. But the restaurant walls wear the same bright and numbered photo menus as every other time, even way back then when they’d all shown up at two in the morning. Remus orders for them both and half-smiles across the table at Sirius when their hostess pours the barley tea.  
  
So Sirius starts it while Remus is driving them back to Montecito Heights. He sets a palm unsteady on Remus’s thigh then drifts across  
  
all the hours Remus must have put into teaching the Prius to accept magic in lieu of its stolen away battery, how his face must have bunched in thought when he’d gone spelling up a replacement for the catalytic converter after it got lifted, too.  
  
“It’s okay,” Remus says. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”  
  
To touch and feel the hardness there. Sirius curves his fingers over. His own heartbeat and rhythmic breath. Coaxing.  
  
Eyes on the freeway and legs tense, Remus moves Sirius aside. Undoes his own pants button and pulls the zipper, then slides his hand under gray elastic and his cock through the boxer fly.  
  
Stroke and hold. Sirius’s palm, the pivot of his wrist. Remus. The familiar arching tunnels and alongside the arroyo. Veering off the freeway to climb the neighborhood. Slowing, slower, slow.  
  
Remus parks on the hill beside the steps to the property and casts a disillusionment charm around them. He reaches, almost climbs to touch tongue tip between Sirius’s teeth. He nudges in and up.  
  
Sirius dreams the desert road, and in the morning the book edges beaches against the rough breathing surf of an ocean.  
  
  
  
Pinking sky, and Sirius leans in wait against the retaining wall near the flaking tiles of the rear patio, Remus having gone down to the dispensary earlier that afternoon alone.  
  
He rubs his thumb over the back of his hand and an inner arm, watches the ink in his skin wrinkle up then go smooth again. He fusses his t-shirt, prickled. Wanders his eyes and spies a coyote standing stillness on the far side of patio.  
  
“What’s up,” he says.  
  
The coyote says nothing, and a commotion at the kitchen’s Dutch door snaps their attention. Remus, all elbows and jostling. He steps outside and makes an exaggerated bow to the coyote, who tilts its snout then eyeballs Sirius before trotting further up the hill.  
  
Remus crosses the patio, crouches at the tenant house to whisper its threshold open. Sirius drops down beside him and shares the words.  
  
When Remus transforms, a coyote to its others calls a kickstart intimacy. Sirius smooths his palm along the wolf’s coat, remembering.  
  
Yips burble up outside and overlap with cackles. The sounds roll along the hill.  
  
“How’re we gonna do this in New York?”  
  
The wolf regards him, and he slips into the dog.  
  
Sirius dreams the Upper East Side, dreams Grimmauld. He leaps from the 12th-storey balcony and rides the rumble and shift on his motorbike away from the city to a far off beach dotted with people. Death Eaters nibble at the corners but give no chase.  
  
The dream witch sleeps on a towel, her face obscured under a wide-brimmed straw hat.  
  
Her hat falls away and she yawns, wipes the back of her hand over her closed eyes.  
  
Then she elbows up and squints at Sirius, beckons him nearer, rises.  
  
“Too soon,” she says. And, “Sucks to be you.”  
  
She squeezes his hand then pats his cheek.  
  
Sirius wakes naked in a track of light on the floor in the tenant house and feels for Remus. He pats around for his pants, his shirt.  
  
Alone and with nothing, he ventures to the main house. The closet in the bedroom seems to be missing most of both their clothes. Sirius tries the bathrobe.  
  
He finds the dream book dozing on the counter beside a mug of coffee wrapped in _Callesco_. He carries them both out to the porch and settles down in a chair, cat dozing beside. The sun is warm and the house sparrows a little chatty. The coffee just right. But the book when he opens it--his hands are tentative, then rapid, then tentative again. For him there had only been a few of them, and each page now is blank.  
  
Sirius stands up and goes to the rail, peers down.  
  
Remus below, leaning on his cane beside the Prius and its open trunk, looks up.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> [ Related jams: St Vincent - bring me your loves, prince johnny / Blood Orange - best to you, it is what it is / Rhye - open, verse / Marceline . Adventure time - I’m just your problem / Justin Bieber - sorry / Frank Ocean - ivy ]


End file.
